Protagonist rule #4: Question everything including yourself

When I worked in the field of software architecture in the 1990s, the general belief was that the upfront design of a software architecture was critically important as it would be exceedingly difficult to change it once you’d committed to it and started development. I was one of the propagators of this notion and did research on architecture assessment, architecture design decisions, and so on. A few decades later, it’s obvious to everyone that the architecture of a software-intensive system can and needs to evolve continuously through architecture refactoring. Agile taught us the YAGNI principle (You Ain’t Gonna Need It) and helped us focus on getting going without overdoing the architecture design.

I bring this up because I wholeheartedly believed in the notion of immutable architectures back then just as I wholeheartedly believe in the notion of evolving architectures now. And maybe, in a decade or so, we’ve all learned more about architecture and we’ll hold other beliefs. It’s not so much that I believe I was wrong then and correct now. In my view, what’s correct at one point in time can cease to be correct and then we need to evolve to what’s the expedient set of beliefs at this point. As protagonists, we have to move on from one set of beliefs to the next as we all grow and develop and this automatically leads to alternative viewpoints and viable beliefs.